The 2010-2011 La Niña weather event brought lush vegetation to vast semi-arid regions in the Southern Hemisphere and altered the delicate balance of the global carbon sinks. Owen Gaffney explores how La Niña might change in the future and what that might imply.

For a decade, ESSP has been a crucial partnership binding together the four global environmental change programmes, IGBP, DIVERSITAS, the International Human Dimensions Programme and the World Climate Research Programme.

Under the leadership of Rik Leemans and Martin Rice, ESSP has co-sponsored some of the most ground-breaking and iconic international research projects of our time: the Global Carbon Project, the Global Water Systems Project, the Climate Change and Food Security project, the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis and several others.

In this time, ESSP has demonstrated the need for a more integrated approach to Earth-system science and set the framework for how this could be achieved successfully.

Now, the international research community is focusing research efforts on solutions to the challenge of global sustainability and even closer harmony between natural and social sciences. This has led to the Future Earth initiative, due to begin in 2013 and anticipated to be operational in 2014. All existing ESSP projects will continue under the lead of the global environmental change programmes until they eventually transition into the new Future Earth initiative.

We acknowledge and applaud the work of ESSP and we commit to building on its successes in the coming years.

This issue features a special section on carbon. You can read about peak greenhouse-gas emissions in China, the mitigation of black carbon emissions and the effect of the 2010-2011 La Niña event on gl...